[lucianbr]

As a regular joe, try to do something legally questionable against Oracle, and then "have the lawyers hammer it out". See how much of a good place the world is in this case.

The problem is this stuff is highly asymmetric. Things are always "hammered out" in their favor, because you cannot afford to be a party to the "hammering out".

[Jensson]

Regular joes use adblockers and torrents etc to do legally questionable things all the time, so not sure what you mean.

Personally I played hundreds of pirated games growing up for free, don't personally know anyone who got into trouble for doing that sort of thing.

[jordanb]

Google torrent lawsuits. Tens of thousands of people have had their lives ruined due to torrent use.

Claiming that there's anything illegal about adblockers is a real stretch, although I can definitely believe that they will eventually be outlawed either by statute or through some torturous legal argument agreed to by corrupt judges.

[Jensson]

> Tens of thousands of people have had their lives ruined due to torrent use.

That is a tiny fraction of the number of people who did it. There are companies that got destroyed due to lawsuits as well, I wouldn't say lawsuits are less of an issue for companies than people, significant lawsuits are very rare in either case.

> Claiming that there's anything illegal about adblockers is a real stretch

It is legally questionable, I didn't say it was illegal we were talking about questionable actions.

[lucianbr]

So in which sense was it "hammered out"? Since not many people got in trouble for it, is it now legal to torrent copyrighted content, and to block ads?

If you're claiming it's still legally questionable, then it was not "hammered out" at all, was it?

[sroussey]

I can think up a few legal ideas off the top of head in regards to adblockers:

From a copyright point of view… adblockers make a derivative work so they should pay the content maker for those. Those are worth orders of magnitude more than the ad would have paid.

Or maybe unfair business practice. Their whole aim is deprive another business of income. Or how they shake down companies for money so the blocker becomes less effective on that site.

Just ideas

[lucianbr]

People did get in trouble for pirating content. That you don't know any of them personally is irrelevant. I don't personally know anyone who got radiation poisoning, so I suppose radiation is not toxic?

Anyway, you downloading torrents is in no way "hammering out a gray area". It's just you being a small fish and slipping under the radar. The area is just as gray as before. Try to do something significant with the pirated content, as the AI startups do, and you'll immediately get trouble.

[stale2002]

> Try to do something significant with the pirated content, as the AI startups do, and you'll immediately get trouble.

No they won't. 80% of the people I meet at tech events either have an AI startup or are working at one. Basically all of them are doing legally questionable stuff, when it comes to copyright law.

Anyone who has ever trained a model, or finetuned a model, is likely using other people's data. This is universal. It is almost everyone.

And yet, despite this being a gray area, basically nobody is getting into trouble for this. We are all getting away with it. And there is only a singular lawsuit about this against like 4 companies and nobody else. (midjourney, runwayML, Stable diffusion, and deviant art)

So the point stands. Almost nobody is getting into trouble, despite this behavior being widespead everywhere, and if you don't do the same thing then you are going to fall behind and fail.

[lucianbr]

> Anyone who has ever trained a model, or finetuned a model, is likely using other people's data. This is universal. It is almost everyone.

Citation needed.

The whole reason there's no legal trouble is that it cannot be proved conclusively that they used copyrighted data for training.

"when the CTO of OpenAI is asked if Sora was trained on YouTube videos, she says “actually I’m not sure” and refuses to discuss all further questions about the training data". Why do you think she's denying the obvious?

[stale2002]

Just look around at all the AI companies that are doing this, dude.

Its a lot of people.

So the point stands, a large number of people are doing this.

Meaning that, yes a lot of people are getting away with this, and only like 4 companies are being sued.

This means that the point about people immediately getting in trouble is wrong, given that a lot of people are doing this.

Can you directly address this point, instead of giving a 2 word response that doesn't really address the point, and instead tries to attack the argument on a technicality because I didn't include a 20 page research paper in my social media comment?

[lucianbr]

Honestly I'm having a really hard time arguing that regular joes are not on the same footing with megacorps as related to "legal gray areas". It's like asking me to prove the sky is blue. Whereas of course, anything you claim, is "obvious, just look around dude".

What's the claim here, that now torrenting is officially legal? People have been torrenting, there's no consequences, it's been hammered out, now it's a-ok?

[scarmig]

Most of the hammering out is giant corporations hammering each other, trying to forge a niche to more effectively extract rents.

The solution is minimal or no government intervention to create state-sponsored monopolies. When you do have those interventions, sometimes corporation A will win, sometimes corporation B will win, but the small scale individual will always lose.

[wombatpm]

When things are hammered out, one party is the hammer and the other party is the nail.